Vetted Apache Kafka Professionals

“Backend/data engineer with experience at AWS and Intuit building and operating production serverless systems and data pipelines. Delivered an internal AWS TV video-processing platform using Step Functions/Lambda/S3/DynamoDB with strong reliability and cost controls, and built Glue-based ETL for compliance/risk events (Kafka to partitioned Parquet). Also modernized legacy compliance systems into Java/Node event-driven services and has demonstrated measurable SQL tuning impact (200s to 20s).”

“Built and shipped an LLM-powered data quality assistant that generates maintainable validation checks from metadata while executing validations via Great Expectations, exposed through FastAPI and integrated into Airflow-managed pipelines. Emphasizes production reliability (structured outputs, guardrails, monitoring, versioning, human review) and works closely with compliance/operations teams to deliver clear, auditable, user-friendly AI outputs.”

“Platform/backend engineer focused on Kubernetes at scale: built a Java control-plane service for multi-region cluster provisioning/monitoring/upgrades using Kafka-driven async workers, and solved peak-load provisioning failures by eliminating blocking I/O and dynamically scaling consumers. Also shipped an LLM-assisted Kubernetes troubleshooting/remediation feature that pulls Prometheus logs/metrics into prompts and uses guardrails (confidence thresholds + human-in-the-loop) to prevent risky actions.”

Akshitha Singireddy

Screened

Junior Software Engineer specializing in data engineering and computer vision

Bellevue, WA1y exp

“Former Amazon intern who owned an end-to-end computer vision system to detect package anomalies in fulfillment centers, from data collection/labeling to production deployment on AWS (EC2/S3) with a Streamlit live-monitoring dashboard. Also has ML-in-production experience deploying and updating a recommendation model on Kubernetes (Minikube) with CI/CD via GitHub Actions, plus prior SDE experience with Jenkins-based pipelines and on-prem to AWS migration work using Glue.”

“Backend engineer who scaled a food delivery platform by migrating from a single-service architecture to Spring Cloud microservices with an API gateway and Kafka-based event-driven order pipeline. Reported outcomes include ~50% latency reduction, stable ~2K RPS throughput, and 99.8% uptime, with strong emphasis on safe migrations (dual writes, canaries, schema versioning) and security (JWT/RBAC/Postgres RLS).”

Ravikanth Kasamsetty

Screened

Executive AI/ML Engineering Leader specializing in cloud-native SaaS and GenAI platforms

23y exp

“Engineering leader who modernized and unified a fragmented product suite at Milestone via a multi-year cloud-native roadmap, delivering an MVP in three quarters and boosting team velocity by 40% through cross-functional squads. At Prometheum, led a trust-building hybrid architecture (AWS control plane + customer-hosted data plane) using Kubernetes to ensure sensitive enterprise data never left customer networks while remaining cloud-agnostic across providers.”

George Liu

Screened

Intern Software Engineer specializing in full-stack, backend, and AI agent systems

Fremont, CA1y exp

“Backend engineer with Tesla experience who redesigned vehicle registration into a step-based, region-configured workflow across 4–5 microservices, enabling partial saves and reducing customer drop-off. Has hands-on experience scaling and securing Python/FastAPI APIs (OAuth2/JWT, CORS), migrating cold data from MySQL to MongoDB via Kubernetes CronJobs, and implementing RBAC/RLS with Supabase + Postgres.”

Sara Rubacha

Screened

Engineering Manager specializing in databases and distributed systems

Weston, FL21y exp

“Aspiring founder exploring an AI automation startup focused on automating processes involved in building companies. Not yet developed specific use cases or raised capital, but describes a clear plan to validate ideas through use-case research, building a pilot, and testing with early customers; not familiar with the VC/accelerator landscape yet.”

“Fitbit engineer who has taken multiple projects from concept to release, including architecting a new warranty-evaluation system that achieved 100% accuracy and saved the company $6M. Interested in exploring startup ideas and emphasizes mission alignment and building strong cross-functional teams.”

“Backend/data engineer with Amazon supply-chain experience building production serverless Python services and ETL pipelines on AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, S3, RDS, Glue). Has modernized legacy SAS jobs into Python with rigorous parity testing and phased migrations, and has delivered major SQL performance gains (minutes down to seconds) through indexing and partitioning.”

“Backend/data engineer from Oscar Health specializing in healthcare claims systems on AWS. Built HIPAA-compliant real-time services (FastAPI/Postgres/Kafka on EKS) and serverless ingestion pipelines, and led modernization of a legacy SAS claims pricing system to Python/Spark with rigorous parity validation. Demonstrated measurable impact with high uptime/low latency services and major Snowflake performance and cost reductions.”

“Backend/data engineer with hands-on production experience across GCP (FastAPI microservices on Kubernetes) and AWS (Lambda, ECS Fargate, Glue). Has modernized legacy SAS batch systems into Python services with parallel-run parity validation, and has strong operational rigor in ETL reliability/monitoring plus proven SQL tuning impact (25s to <300ms, ~60% CPU reduction).”

“Built and shipped a production LLM-powered medical scribe that generates structured clinical visit summaries using RAG, strict JSON schemas, and post-generation validation to reduce hallucinations. Experienced in making LLM workflows deterministic and observable (structured logging/metrics/tracing) and in evaluation-driven iteration with metrics like schema pass rate and edit rate; collaborated closely with clinicians and policy stakeholders at Scale AI to drive adoption.”

“Backend/platform engineer with experience at Microsoft, Uber, and Gusto building production AI-agent automation systems in Python (AutoGen) and cloud-native microservices on Kubernetes across AWS/Azure. Has delivered zero-downtime migrations and high-throughput real-time streaming pipelines (Kafka/WebSockets/Redis), and is strong in GitOps/ArgoCD-driven CI/CD with reliable rollouts and rapid rollback.”

“Built and shipped a real-time AI phone agent for small businesses that handles bookings/FAQs/messages using streaming ASR, an LLM with tool-calling, and TTS; deployed to production for multiple paying customers. Demonstrates strong applied LLM reliability practices (tool-first grounding, retrieval, hard-negative testing, and production monitoring) and experience orchestrating multi-step AI workflows with Airflow, Prefect, and AWS Step Functions.”

Sergey Pustovit

Screened

Director-level Data Platform & Analytics Engineering Leader specializing in distributed systems

Irvine, CA31y exp

“Entrepreneurially minded builder focused on proving architecture concepts via minimal demo prototypes for marketing. Has hands-on experience improving an A/B experimentation framework by interviewing stakeholders, identifying system limits and bottlenecks, and defining success criteria to scale experimentation and speed up analysis.”

“Backend/AI engineer who built a production GPU-backed real-time inference API at Nvidia and debugged burst-induced tail latency, cutting P95 by ~29% through dynamic batching and backpressure. Also shipped an end-to-end RAG + agentic operational diagnostics assistant with strict tool controls, evidence citation, confidence gating, and strong production guardrails, plus demonstrated hands-on Postgres optimization (900ms to 40–60ms).”

“Data engineer focused on building and operating reliable Airflow-orchestrated pipelines into BigQuery, including daily billing ingestion (~1GB/day) and ad platform (Facebook/LinkedIn) data collection. Implemented end-to-end data quality checks plus org-wide incident response automation integrating PagerDuty, Slack, and Jira, and has experience executing large backfills (4–5TB) via time-window batching.”

Pankaj Goyal

Screened

Director-level Engineering Leader specializing in FinTech, IAM, and AI/ML platforms

SF Bay Area, CA22y exp

“Player-coach backend leader at PostLo who led a major backend architecture upgrade to enable AI-driven features by separating transactional systems from AI workloads (vector embeddings/image validation) and adding async processing for heavy jobs. Also owned production reliability improvements (query/index optimization, workload isolation, monitoring and load testing) and translated an ambiguous retention goal into a shipped cashback rewards feature with auditable transactions.”